In the early 1960s the NIH had a scheme for advanced circulation of preprints
Eventually, as you can imagine, it got quite out of hand, and it was stopped.
So I imagine the NIH beaurocrats managed to get round the copywrite problem.
As a biologist/immunologist/molecular biologist I think preprint abstracts
would be useful, provided they could be indexed and searched for key-words.
All the Federation of American Biological Societies Abstracts (and all those
other bulky special editions of journals with abstracts) could more readily be
scanned electronically.
But my overall feeling is that the proposers are not really biting the bullet
Why not set up a fully fledged primary electronic journal?
Sincerely,
Don Forsdyke